Comemadre

Literary Latin American Flatliners: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.

On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, Doctor Quintana pines for head nurse Menéndez while he and his colleagues embark on a grisly series of experiments to investigate the line between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and farce: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and flesh-eating plants. Here the monstrous is not alien, but the consequence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.

Publication date: July 10, 2018

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.75

Page count: 152 pages

ISBN: 9781566895156

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Roque Larraquy is an Argentinian writer, screenwriter, professor of narrative and audiovisual design, and the author of two books, La comemadre and Informe sobre ectoplasma animal. Comemadre will be his first book published in English.

Heather Cleary’s translations include César Rendueles’s Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets and The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions.

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award

A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction of 2018

“Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, [Comemadre] has almost no equal in literature.”

—BOMB

“Sad, funny, and pitch-perfect.”

—World Literature Today

“The prose is distilled but rich—like dark chocolate.”

—The Chicago Tribune

“Slyly funny and viscerally affecting, in a fluid translation by Heather Cleary, Comemadre is the medicine-meets-art horror story of my dreams.”

—The Huffington Post

“It’s a brief novel, but its impact is massive.”

—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“A mutilated novel about the art of mutilating bodies.”

—Book Post

“In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition.”

—The Millions

“Layered without growing dense, the book is crisply comic, scenes punctuated like punchlines. That it all happens within a mere 130 pages is a sort of magic trick—the dizzying kind where a body gets sawed in half.”

—The A.V. Club

“A deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel.”

—Booklist 

“Larraquy ventures into the gothic here, only to push beyond it into an even more disquieting realm of obsession, transformation, and the monstrous unknown.”

—Words Without Borders

“Larraquy has written a perfect novel: spare, urgent, funny, original, and infused with wonderfully subtle grace. I neglected my domestic duties to devour it.”

—Elisa Albert

“Walking a line between parody and critique, this is a grotesquely funny and powerful book.”

—Brian Evenson

“Heather Cleary’s magnificent translation does justice to this extravagant gem—composed like a Hieronymus Bosch diptych that sets us before the monsters of unleashed reason.”

—Daniel Saldaña París